When I saw it is three hours, I waited until later. And then found some reviews of it, first, to help orient myself. Granted the internet symbolism accounts of stuff like "Life of Pi", and other movies, is pretty canned, with generic and elegant stuff that just ain't so in real life.

I watched about the first hour of it. It's not that far off some of the local farm life. Perhaps, Russia, or wherever they shot this one is more rural in character. (At least, the idea of perfecting the technology you do have rather than continually moving on to new technology is the Russian approach.) On a farm in the middle of nowhere, beside neighbors you never really come to know, some of the scenery resembles this, in pig styes, manure piles, and other places, especially after a rain.

Things are changing, but farms were passed down from father to son, and neither had even heard of a agricultural degree. (People with agricultural degrees do some funny things on farms, now, until they learn the hard way, though they, more and more, work for large corporations that buy up and farm the land.) The movie relaxed me, and reminded me of the tinge of constant uncertainty that comes, I suppose, from a lack of books and other conventional technology. There's always a feeling, on a farm, of weird stuff that can happen at any time. A rabid skunk, a heavy machinery accident, a big wood saw run amok, transients and cattle rustlers in the middle of night, etc. We once had a serial murderer where I grew up close to a very small town. An out-of-province guy killed three or four women one weekend. Mutilation style.

Anyway, here're the reviews, for the benefit of others.

There’s no getting around it: “Hard To Be A God” is one of the most consistently disgusting films ever made. On completion of some explanatory opening titles, the movie depicts a dank, grim, perpetually chilly and humid medieval world. A couple of extras are seen, splattered in mud, but on consideration, the viewer can’t be sure it’s mud. What came to mind for me was the immortal exchange from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” as two characters watch a spotless Arthur pass: “Must be a king.” “Why?” “Because he hasn’t got s**t all over him.”

In this movie, neither king-dom nor dukedom nor God-dom confers any such sort of privilege. Also, everyone in this movie has a horrible cold, because everyone has liquid or snot or some combination thereof dripping from his or her nose and/or is hocking up and spitting softball-sized wads of phlegm. It just never ends. I’m not even getting into the misshapen naked bodies, the mutilating mortal wounds suffered by characters throughout, the hung corpses festered with I can’t even tell you what, and, oh, the spilling intestines. You think maybe because it’s in black-and-white that it’s not gonna churn your stomach, but no: the integrity of the special effects is such that it’s likely that you’ll stop thinking they’re special effects after a while, and the unrelenting nature of the grotesque atmosphere is just too effective.

Sounds great, right? You can see why I gave it four stars. And yet I will insist: “Hard To Be A God,” the final film by the inspired Russian director Alexei German—a film he spent four decades planning and a dozen years making, a film he did not actually live to complete (post-production was handled by his widow and his son, both close longtime collaborators of the filmmaker)—is not only an unforgettable individual masterpiece but probably one of the capital-G Great Films. You’ll need a strong stomach and another kind of endurance to sit through it, as it’s nearly three hours long and is more than a little oblique in its approach to narrative (I know, it just keeps getting better!), but once it is over you know you’ve really had an experience. An experience very different from watching an average or even a very good conventional film.

Some background: Like his contemporary Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexei German was only able to make a handful of features in his career, which began in the ‘60s. His first solo directorial effort, 1971’s “A Trial On The Road,” is both one of his most accessible films and a persuasive piece of evidence that nobody does the war movie better than the Russians. Snow, stale and scarce cigarettes, random acts of violence and interludes of terror; “Road” has them all, and in spite of its “victory is ours” coda, this WWII chronicle got banned for 15 years. “Hard To Be A God” is more in the mode of German’s delirious 1998 “Khrustalyov, My Car,” in which a gregarious, hard-living doctor is subject to unspeakable humiliations during the last days of the Stalin regime. Stalin hangs over “Hard To Be A God” like a mordantly chortling specter.

The late director Aleksei Guerman’s last film is a grandly arbitrary carnival of neo-medieval depravity. It’s also a mudpunk allegory of Russian barbarism and backwardness. The action is set on a planet that knew no Renaissance (let alone an Enlightenment) and keeps its inhabitants, with their modern-day consciousness and vernacular, trapped in the low-tech crudeness and amoral violence of the Middle Ages. The protagonist is an Earth-born scientist sent to investigate the retrograde realm, where he’s known as the nobleman Don Rumata and is considered divine. The drama begins with the killing of an intellectual critic, which sends the stagnant society into an inexorable spiral of wanton slaughter. Guerman films these monstrous visions with an obsessive attention to detail. With a glistening black-and-white palette, he smears the screen with mud, blood, and excrement; he displays a mad glee in designing, building, and deploying grotesque tools of torture and murder; his roving, wide-angle closeups render the teeming cast as living gargoyles. Yet his disgust and horror are set off with aesthetically distanced satire; the movie’s artful pride in brazen destruction is itself a political commentary. In Russian.

P.S. The only free link to it I found is https://sovietmoviesonline.com/fanta...byt-bogom.html . It works well with the captions, and has a good picture. But, you have to restart from where left off each time it asks you to pay to see more. Every twenty minutes or so.

Very heavy movie, very "Russian," and probably not to the taste of most Americans.

But the sets, the actors, the black and white filming: a stunningly realistic recreation of a quasi-medieval world, where near insanity runs rampant and death is always just one step behind.

I liked the reference to Munchausen, if I read it right, as the subtitles flew past about how many bodyguards or friends the guy has. There are only two such numbers, and those depend on 0 exp 0 = either 0 or 1. A strange set of numbers which rely on 0 exp 0 both ways. A subset of narcissistic numbers.

I don't know if this would fit the description, but I really liked What Happened to Monday. It's a Netflix movie, but certainly nothing with a crazy budget or promotion. Sci-fi dystopian genre with a great story.

Starring Adam west from 4 years ago.....with his deadpan batman delivery...you learn her had a great sense of humor, very thoughtfull...shows some warts but doesnt dwell on them. But for me as a kid, Batman emptied the streets of my neighborhood twice a week

And then life went on with me....and I just caught up on how life was with him recently with this film. I really admire the guy as he accepted and didnt fight his position in life....built up equity with the public and went on to bigger things.